Obama Continues to Distance Himself From Columbia

Obama and grandparents at a bench in Riverside Park adjacent to Columbia, a few yards from where I type this.

You gotta wonder what Columbia did (or didn't do) to our next President.

Obama, who transferred to Columbia and graduated in 1983, rarely mentioned Columbia during the campaign. Even during a visit to Columbia in September for a candidates forum with John McCain, Obama played down his connection to Columbia. If anything, he criticized the university during the event: "With all due respect to the President of this fine university, the best education I ever had was on the streets of Chicago."

Obama has also refused speaking invitations ever since the University began inviting him in 2004. By contrast, John McCain, who did not attend Columbia but whose daughter graduated from Columbia in 2006, has.

It may not come as a surprise then that, with the launch of the new White House webpage today, Obama's biographical page does not make any mention of Columbia (let alone the Ivy League or New York City). It does, however, mention that the President attended Harvard Law. It's not stylistic either: both Vice President Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama have plugs for the University of Delaware and Princeton in their bios, respectively.

Now I don't begrudge the President for refusing to chum up the Alma Mater like he does Harvard Law. I can't imagine he has much connection to, or appreciation for, a school that threw him out on the street his first night here and reportedly denied him the opportunity to graduate with honors because he was a transfer student.

Columbia is plagued by the notion that it lacks the sort of community and alumni network that other sesqui-bicentennial universities and its rivals in the Ivy League boast. (The least of it being the fact that Columbia's meager alumni giving rate hurts the school in the ever-important annual US News rankings, which on occasion ranks Ivies like the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth a bit higher, despite being what many consider lesser academic institutions). That the Columbia Club of New York, the school's official alumni organization in its backyard of New York City, has no official clubhouse in that backyard and has actually had to rent access to the Princeton Clubhouse in midtown Manhattan (not far from the Penn, Harvard, or Yale clubhouses, which serve those institutions beyond their statelines) really cements Columbia's impotence in this regard.

Now, the fact that the first Columbian elected President refuses to even acknowledge the school only makes it worse. Despite the fanfare on Low Plaza today, PrezBo has got to be worried about the way Obama avoids Columbia as if it were the plague, not unlike the way John McCain avoided Bush 43 during the campaign.

In Columbia's defense, Obama may just lack attachment to a school where he lived as a self-described "monk." That said, if Columbia denies me Latin Honors because I'm a transfer student, they sure as hell aren't getting so much as a dime from me.

The Bush Legacy in A Nutshell: Part II

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I think Olbermann's been waiting to do this since January 2001.

The Bush Legacy in A Nutshell: Tragedy

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Chris Matthews provides a pretty good explanation of what was so horribly wrong with the Bush presidency in this clip from Countdown tonight. Matthew's focus here is on foreign policy, but the general diagnosis of "ignorant delusion" is on the money for all facets of this presidency. It's also why I can't really despise 43. He was, and will forever remain, just too ignorant to know any better.

Bush wasn't the only one to eat up Cheney, Rove and Wolfowitz's neo-conservative delusion like it was communion. The "tragedy," as Matthews put it, is that at least a third of Americans, and nearly all of those who really, genuinely believe in objective "truths" and risen prophets, also drank the Kool-aid Bush poured them daily for the past eight years.

(If you listen to the language of Bush's speech tonight--"good versus evil," "truth and justice," "freedom as God's gift to mankind," "the universality of liberty,"etc.-- it makes sense why the message has caught on as good sermon.)

That neo-conservative ideology just seems to "fit" with many folks brought up in a popular American sub-culture is as benign as it is predictable. The only horrific and deleterious aspect is that our leaders are supposed to know better.

Religion and ideology may be the opiate of the masses, but neither--notwithstanding the two combined!--should ever become the policy of any country, let alone the world's most dominant. This is where shit hit the fan, and hard: neo-conservative dogma was not only made American policy at home, it was decidedly imposed abroad at the point of a bayonet.

In the words of the late Samuel Huntington writing in 1995, imposing one's civilization on another is "false, immoral, and dangerous." Indeed, the last eight years have shown us why.

Even though many of the damages of the Bush years may be irreversible, the forthcoming Obama presidency offers a much needed return to smart and practical optimism in U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

The Dream Lives On

The following ran in today's Los Angeles Daily News. It can be found at this webpage.

THERE was once a dream that was Los Angeles, a shining city along the sea electrified by ambitions as bright as 360 days of golden sunshine. A city of high-paying jobs, where anyone could own a house in a good neighborhood, with good schools, and maybe even a pool.

Now, perhaps I'm just too young, idealistic and far removed here in New York City - an expatriate Angeleno studying in Manhattan - to realize that it's a dream that died long ago. But somewhere, buried beneath the asphalt parking lots and gated cookie-cutter mansions of the Valley, drowned out by the egos of the Westside and squelched by the red tape of City Hall, I know the dream lives on.

It lives on in the many Angelenos who remember when Los Angeles was an emblem of American opportunity and diversity, a leader in public education, good jobs and safe neighborhoods. They remember what it was like when ordinary folks like teachers, police officers, clerks, cooks and laborers could afford to work in the city and live there, too.

And it also lives on in a newer generation of Angelenos, young people my age who have a vision of what L.A. could become. We know that the future of L.A. is not the ultra-lux condos and urban chic crowd that has populated much of the recent development downtown, in the Mid-City district and along the Wilshire corridor.

We know that the L.A. of our lifetimes will be fueled by new industrial centers to provide high-paying jobs, affordable housing to live in and accessbile public spaces to enjoy.

It's a future where schools offer specialized pre-professional training and increase teacher pay while standing up to unions. It's a future with smart government budgeting that doesn't cave to bureaucratic or business lobbies, funds promising projects and takes a scalpel to bad programs.

And perhaps most importantly, it's a future woven together by a clean and effective system of mass transit that actually takes Angelenos from all ZIP codes to where they need to go.

Los Angeles calls herself the city of the future - well, now she has the opportunity to prove it. A national shift in energy policy and a new federal recommitment to public works is sowing the seeds of a new green economy that Los Angeles is primed to convert into the sort of industrial reinvigoration at the core of this vision.

Just as aerospace and entertainment industries in the '50s and '60s produced a swath of upper middle-class Angelenos who bought plots in the Valley and West Side, so too will this new economy create a new bubble of middle-high earners looking for places to live.

The future of Los Angeles is not about expanding into exhausted suburbs that now crawl up canyons and hills. The future is about growing up into condominiums and apartments. This isn't a new idea, but the problem is that all the vertical development so far in L.A. has been exclusively high-end. Los Angeles needs affordable housing for the growing middle class that will usher in a golden age.

Without proof of affordable housing, industry can't expand into Los Angeles. Without industry, Los Angeles can't afford essential improvements to mass transit, education and public safety.

These transportation improvements would add light-rail lines connecting LAX to downtown and the Westside and the Westside to the Valley - not to mention the "subway to the sea." While college preparation must be a goal for all high schools, job training and career education programs in the burgeoning green industry have benefits as well.

Improvements in public safety would explore new types of community policing, putting more cops on the street and embedded into local communities and institutions.

Realizing this dream will need sound leadership and political bravery. It will take a grass-roots effort to elect a new vanguard, one that avoids uncomfortable commitments to the usual suspects and reports first and foremost to the people and their interests. In fact, some of these leaders may already be in place.

It's an exciting time to have a vision for Los Angeles, but it's terribly frustrating to know there's only so much a 20-year-old can do from Manhattan. Yes, times are tough right now, but there is a dream that will be Los Angeles. Together, as committed Angelenos united, we will realize it one day.

Adam S. Sieff is a lifetime San Fernando Valley resident. He graduated from Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City and is currently an undergraduate at Columbia University.